Sacrum Reddere: Sacrifice, Consecration, and Dedication in Roman Religion

This paper argues that the close connections among sacrifice, consecration, and dedication in modern thought are not matched by similar connections among Roman sacrificium, consecratio, and dedicatio. Although these three Roman rituals have sometimes been grouped together in recent scholarship on the basis that they all appear to do the same work – namely, they endow an everyday object with a sacred status – the Romans do not seem to have connected sacrificium to the other two.